by Jim Kroswell
Lawson breathed in a deep breath and looked at his computer screen. The map blaring at him from his screen showed a map of the world and the red dots represented cases of bacterial eruptions. He watched it with an evil joy in his heart. Each little red dot represented a spot where his finger reached and these were the spawns of his soul. They represented his power and his potential, they were his army and he was their leader.
***
Dr. Samuels now had a clue and he needed to act upon it. After several calls and research attempts by his assistants, he had been given an address. They knew where he was. He should have probably made plans to contact someone first, but he felt the most direct approach was the best, so he booked his plane flight and he would be leaving with the next five hours.
Dr. Samuels car pulled up the driveway and he noticed the beads of sweat starting to form on his temples again. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was go in there, but the doctor in him, the healer, the care taker, wanted nothing more than to bust through the door and make it all better. His eyes were red and although he knew that he was on his way, he was close to something that could possible pull this under control, he also knew he had nothing tangible and in reality he was millions of miles from a solution. The world was deteriorating fast and he could hear the news casters on the radio, with frantic energy in their voice, talk about the lootings of the stores and the break down of the general fabric of society as panic and hysteria set in, panic and hysteria that there was no hope and there was no doctor or scientist or government official that had the ways or means to stop this. He pulled up the courage, the last bit of courage he seemed to possess, and cracked open the door of his car. He trudged up the sidewalk and put his finger to the door bell. He knew that his estranged wife would not be able to hear it, or would not be able to answer, so he grabbed the key beneath the mat, and unlocked the door. He entered slowly as if entering a tomb, in a way it was, and walked slowly up the red carpeted stairs to where he knew his young son's room was. He whispered out into the air, "Hello. I'm here." He could hear soft sobbing and something inside of him died. But this death gave him the strength he needed to turn the knob of the door. There they were, his entire world. "Linda. I'm so sorry." She sat there with the boy in her arms, his eyes sealed shut with some kind of infectious crust. He rushed over and grabbed the boy, who gave a slight start and whose limbs gave a slight quiver. He was dying, quickly. It strengthened his resolve to get to the bottom of this, to find out what part Lawson played in it all, and most of all, to save his son. Linda looked up with her blue green eyes. They were tired and there were many creases on her face. Dr. Samuels looked at her and in his stare he transferred all of his hope and good intentions and she immediately felt it. The energy that had been zapped away from her all came back and she grinned at him. They were going to make it, he knew it in that moment. He handed the boy back to her and proceeded to explain to her that this may all be an attack, an attack by a mad scientist on the entire world, and that he alone it seemed had an idea of what was happening and who was at fault. He told her he was going to go and try to stop it. She knew that he had more than her and the boy on his plate, he had the fate of the human race, and she forgave him the neglect.
***
Dr. Samuels sat in his plane seat and stared out the window at the clouds below him. He had the world hanging on his actions. He took out a picture of his son, looked at it for half a second and returned it to his pocket. He had Lawson on the brain. He was going to find this dirt bag and rip his guts out. He felt like personally injecting him with the bacteria he so eagerly infected the world with. He let his head fall backwards and hit the head rest. He needed to be more methodical about this. He could not allow himself to become hot headed. Lawson was a bad man, there was no doubt, but to meet him with anger would be a fool's mistake. This was a scientist and he would be careful not to expose himself to too much vulnerability, so he needed to find an in, a way to gain his trust and then bam, rip his guts out.
***
Lawson thought long and hard about what he should do next. He looked out his window and then down at his pudgy fingers. He knew he was a mastermind but at the moment he felt confused. He had set out his bacteria onto the world, the problem was that they were not proliferating as quickly as he would like for them to. Yes, they had been outbroke at hospitals, and there were many infected and they appeared to look incurable to the doctors there. Yes, he knew that at any moment he could flip the switch and the bacteria would begin to latch onto the hosts nervous system and proceed to control them. These were all well and good, but the waiting was monotonous. He wanted to have a saturation of approximately 50% before her turned his bugs on and right now it hovered around 22. His eyes were blood shot, as he hadn't slept in three days. Really, who could. He was planning on taking over every living thing, every person would be at his disposal and the rush of dizzying energy would not allow his mind to rest for even an instant.
Lawson had a childhood filled with books and bullies. He was constantly tormented by school boy aggressors and he fled inside his own mind. He was a consummate scientist, he worked day and night to understand the laws of nature, biology and chemistry. He was in his lab one afternoon when the thought hit him that he could use what he knew about the microbiological world to inflict his will upon all those around him. He could make all of the bullies of his past pay for when he could see them, infected by his bugs, clamoring for life, but all the while controlled by him, then he could be satisfied. He ached to see their faces full of pussy sores. He wanted them to be in pain. He felt he needed a general sort of pay back to all of the people of the world who rejected his very existence. No, he was not a handsome man, he was a very grotesque looking man, and his grotesqueness grew more and more year by year. He recognized this, he could see himself in the mirror. He was fully aware that he was not accepted, let alone welcomed, into the society into which he was born. He felt he was born into the wrong world, but he blamed the inhabitants in it for the scourge they inflicted upon him, a scourge of lonliness and sadness that only felt lifted when he felt he could exact his revenge upon him. When he made them pay, then he could be satisfied, then he could rest. He felt the top of his head, it was extremely smooth. He had no hair on his head, although it would be mostly white if he had. He had a series of brown spots on his head that looked as if someone with brownish, greyish paint had poured it out in splotched by holding a can and pouring it directly above his head. He truly was hideous. He accepted his discoloration, but he did not accept that it was not accepted by others. They treated him like a pariah and he counted not even one person as a friend. In a person with a lesser mind all of these things would probably be expressed at monster truck rallies or at wrestling matches, pities drowned with beer and hot dogs, but in a person with the kind of steel trap of a mind like Lawson, every bit of emptiness and sadness was felt and magnified and seen as impetus for a plan to make the world feel, if only a fraction of, the amount of bitterness he felt daily. Lawson turned his eyes towards his computer screen. The next step of his plan could not be embarked upon until he reached 50. He needed to infections, he needed more rapid transmissions. The options were to rest or to find more methods of innoculation. He had already made use of water supplies, food supplies, restaurants, hotels, libraries, any place where he could start the process of spreading. He began it in Los Angeles and watched it as it spread to the eastern states. He knew that the United States would be the best place to begin the world process as so many people travel through the country and he knew that the LA International Airport was the prime spot of international innoculation of US soil. He worked hard to infect as much of the airport as a single person could, with he himself completely immune to the bacteria, as he had made sure of that from the beginning.
***
Dr. Samuels watched the trees go by as he drove down the freeway headed for the biological research center Dr. Terrence Lawson created, The XLaw Bio Labs. He was using the XLaw Labs as his cov
er for his devious plans. Under guises of pills to lower cholesterol and the like, Lawson was hatching his schemes. Samuels was nervous about the confrontation. He wasn't even sure what he was going to say exactly. In any case, he had to do this. At the moment, every major scientific organization was busily trying to figure out a way to stop the bacterial infection spread and no one was having any luck. He himself had nothing left. They had tried every antibiotic known to man and a few experimental ones that were not quite released yet. Nothing was working and the people who were supposed to be in charge, the people who you called in for back up, even they had no clue where to go next. They had suspected for years that an outbreak of this magnitude was possible and maybe even probable, but no one expected that something would come along that could possible take out the human race. That was something for the science fiction books, not real life, and yet here was Dr. Samuels, facing the possibility of losing the ones most dear to him, and looking around to see things slowly descending into mass hysteria. Luckily there was still infrastructure, the roads still worked, the airplanes still flew, but he didn't know for how much longer. It seemed the news could only report more and more cases of new bacterial infection and no one was getting any better. He didn't really believe that Lawson was behind this. He didn't really believe that he was traveling towards an answer. But he had no choice. It may be a needle in a haystack and he may just be chasing after a piece of hay, but it was the only piece of hay in his grasp so he had no choice but to hope it was the needle. Could Lawson truly be at the heart of this? He didn't know much about him, only that he was a somewhat crazy scientist and that he was known to be greedy and his company was always innovating new drugs for high profits. Samuels didn't really believe that a single person, or even multiple people, could be behind such a phenomenon. He thought, truly, that this had to be the work of a higher mechanism, possibly not god, as he was not a religious person, but possibly a biological mechanism, an evening out of things if you will. Maybe the earth was tired of people and needed to get rid of them and this was the way it was going to do it. Samuels cringed at the idea that the people of the earth were going to be swept aways like so much debris from a living room floor. He wasn't going to let it go down like that, not while he still had a breath of air in his body. He coughed. He wasn't sure what that was. So far he had had no signs of being infected. He was careful to keep his immune system in top shape and to use as much antibacterial lotion, gloves, masks and all other sorts of protection that were commonly used at the hospital. He couldn't catch it. He needed to be in tip top shape to save everyone. It was just a cough. Maybe he was just being overly sensitive and who could blame him for being paranoid. Everyone was dropping like flies around him.
***
Renaldo sobbed and sobbed as he sat in the waiting room of the hospital. He could not bare to bring himself to leave. His true love, his only love, the only woman he had ever had this sort of relationship with, slipped away from him during the night. He had promised her that he would do everything to save her. He had promised her that she would live. He lied. She had not lived, she had died an agonizing death. She was in pain, her body was covered in puscules and he could do nothing but sit there and watch her being eaten alive. She was the kindest, sweeetest person he had ever known and most importantly, she had depended on him. He swore, at that very moment, that he would die trying to find a way to make her death mean something. He had to do something, he had to figure out a way to make it make sense. She couldn't leave like that. Her life could not be for nothing. It was up to him to make her life mean something, and what it meant was that she was a catalyst, she was the motivating factor behind his entire life and his entire life he was now vowing would be to stop this bacteria, find who was behind it if there was a person, or at least make the people pay who allowed it to go on for this long. He wanted heads, and he wanted heads now.
***
Dr. Samuels looked squarely across the desk at Dr. Lawson. It was a meeting of the minds. This is where the fireworks were going to go down, except there were no fireworks.
"Dr. Lawson, I have my sources that you are at the root of the evil that is befalling our nation, and potentially our world, at this point in time."
Dr. Lawson looked wryly at Dr. Samuels. His eyes were dead inside and Samuels knew it. There was nothing left. "I have no idea what you refer to Dr. Samuels, although believe you me I am quite excited why you made your way all the way down here. Our offices are on this small island. I can't imagine that you would have any other business out here." Samuels knew that he was over a barrel. He suddenly felt his own life in grave danger. It was almost refreshing, for he had been thinking his life was in danger by infection, and now it was in danger by cold ruthless hands, or rather cold steel guns, potentially. "I do not mean to offend you Dr. Lawson, but offense is exactly what I am implying. I know you are behind the bacterial infections that are spreading like wild fire to every conceivable neighborhood in the US of A, and by dammit, I am here to stop you."
"Dr. Samuels, you can can imagine my great sadness at what is happening right now in the world. I truly am sorry and am quite upset by it myself. I can't imagine what the government and their little scientists, burrowing away in their little labs, must be going through right now. It must be truly frustrating. Here as XLaw Labs we take science very seriously, but our work is more in the preventable disease sector, and we do not venture in infectious diseases. I am sorry you have wasted your time, but our services cannot help you. And frankly, I am done now. I am a very busy and a very rich man, I do not have time to trifle with petty accusations. I am a man of science and I hold human health in the highest modicum possible. Please, leave now." Lawson looked Samuels square in the eye and his eyes were not dead this time, there was life behind them, there was fire, but it was not of good. This was an evil fire that glowed in his soul and Samuels felt sorry for ever having to witness it. But, he knew that he had to be stronger than that. He could not go running away like a young school child. He had a child of his own who was counting on him this very instance to gather the strength and courage to battle this monster and so he took a deep breath and took another tactic.
"You don't seem to understand Dr. Terrence Lawson. I have a son and he is dying right now as we speak. I know you are a bastard and that's fine. But I will not allow you to kill my child." At this, Lawson picked up a phone and spoke into it, "Yes, send security in please."
Dr. Samuels stood up, he was losing this. He slammed his fists on the desk. "You will not get away with this! I don't know how you're doing this and I don't care. I don't know what devious plans you have up your sleeve. I don't know why you want to make the whole world sick, but I know as well as I know my own skin, that you are behind this. You will pay. I will not allow you to destroy the world. You created something, you created some sort of monster bacteria, and now it's killing everyone. Don't you have a heart!"
The security barged through the closed doors and grabbed Samuels by his arms and pulled him away. "I will find out what you're doing Lawson! You have not heard the last of me. You remember that!" And in just three seconds there was no more Samuels in the room.
Lawson sat at his desk. There was a calm in the room and as much as Lawson pretended that he was not phased, he had not enjoyed that encounter. This was the first instance of the situation touching him, the first instance of it seeming real at all. He didn't particurlarly like it. This Dr. Samuels had a lot of gall. He could not know of his plans, he could not know anything. Somehow he had found his name, and somehow he had conceived of a hunch, but it could be no more than that. Lawson had exhibited a cool exterior, but he was actually quite shooken up. How dare this mad man burst into his office this way. It was so uncivilized. Dr. Lawson picked up his pen and began to write. He was writing a letter.
***
Dr. Samuels sat in his rented car and seethed. This man was outrageous. He had just been thrown out of his office and was no further than before, other than letting the enemy know
that he was on his tracks. It was obvious from this encounter that Terrence Lawson was definitely hiding something and had something to do with this at least and at most was the driving force behind it. In his cool calculating manner, with the way that he showed now regard for life, or for his family, he knew that only this level of cold heartedness could conceive of or plot to do something as cynical as destroy the world. After meeting Lawson, Samuels knew that he had it in him. He wasn't sure coming here, but he was positive leaving. This was the monster behind it all.
He drove and drove trying to conceive of what his next move should be. He really had no idea. Lawson seemed untouchable, especially as there was no direct proof, only hushed conversations overheard and a serious hunch. That equalled out to basically nothing. But Samuels knew it in his bones that Lawson was the creep in standing right now and it was up to Samuels to figure out how to capture the squirrel. As it is with squirrels, the best method of entrapment is exactly that, a trap. He needed to set something up, but in order to do that he needed bait. He definitely needed more information. Maybe going right into the snake pit was not the very best idea he could have had, but he just felt that he had to know, he had to look at the face of what he felt could be the genesis of this mess, and he did just that. He also found what he thought he would, the face of evil, the eyes of nothingness.
